


To Live Forever

by charlesworthy



Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating and Warning will probably change as things continue fyi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 00:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13601772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlesworthy/pseuds/charlesworthy





	To Live Forever

Lyon slid next to Knoll in the lunch line, offering his usual timid smile at the taller man. Knoll smiled back, graciously, the same as any one would have done.

It wasn't because he was the head researcher, though that certainly gained him a certain respect among the people on board. Doctor Lyon Baudin had personally significantly funded their entire research effort, giving them the expenditure and ability to update their facilities for the next three decades in one single donation. Even having spent so much on their operation aboard the satellite, he was still worth more money than Knoll was convinced he could fathom as the sole inheritor of the trillions of credits his father had left him upon dying.

He'd earned his doctorate at only nineteen. Knoll, five years his senior, might have taken some offense to that kind of challenge to his intellect, but as the other researchers aboard, it was hard to dislike Lyon. He was kind to a fault, had learned each of the others' names within three days of his arrival, and spoke with such a passion for his work that one couldn't help but admire him in some way.

He concerned himself mainly with improving the condition of lives in everyday people, and decided (clearly years and years ago, with how stubbornly he pursued the idea) that genetic research was going to be the way he'd do it.

“The twins sent me an EM back,” he said. He was so bad at keeping the excitement from his voice.

“Oh?”

“Yes! They said their father has business surface-side. It'll be a few months, still, but they've convinced him to drop them off at the dock instead of staying at a hotel.”

Even dumping food onto his tray, Lyon moved with a strange type of sereneness Knoll could never understand. He found himself staring often. “You'll have to file the necessary paper work to reserve them rooms.”

“Oh, that won't be a problem,” Lyon replied dismissively. It was true enough. In a way, Lyon may as well have owned the satellite himself. Even the people who were in charge of things financially or bureaucratically bent the rules where Lyon was involved. It was mere fortune that Lyon had never been much of a rule-breaker. “I'm not worried about it. Should worst come to pass, I'll hide them away in my room. It'll be like when we were children, except I imagine we'd both give up the bed for Eirika and...”

Knoll began tuning him out. Lyon was a brilliant scientist, unbelievably compassionate, and more than a little bit handsome, but he had a tendency, sooner or later, to talk at length about his best friends to the point where Knoll thought he knew more about Ephraim and Eirika than he did about Lyon.

He pulled away from the lunch line to sit down in a break in Lyon's speech, and Lyon followed him.

“Right, there I go again,” he said. “Sorry, Knoll...”

“You're excited,” Knoll pardoned, forcing a smile. “Don't mind me. I didn't sleep much at all last night.”

“Night...” Lyon giggled. “Like we can tell.”

Knoll gave a small chuckle. Most people, after awhile, would have gotten completely used to living on an orbiting satellite to the point it became boring and mundane. Lyon hadn't, yet, and Knoll was unsure if he ever would.

“Is your arm bothering you again?”

Knoll dropped his fork, stretching out his left arm. His fingers wiggled stiffly, the decorative flesh glove bending unconvincingly at his joints. “A little bit,” he answered. “I've tried tinkering with it a bit, but I lost the schematics years ago...”

“Knoll!” Lyon chided, giggling. “I used to be good with machines when I was a kid... I could take a look. No promises, though, I'm a geneticist, not a mechanic.”

“Maybe one of them could get this thing working right again,” he joked, dryly. “Satellite engines can't be too different from a human arm.”

“Just rearrange the carbons a bit,” Lyon said. He laughed again. He was one of the few that thought Knoll was funny.

“Of course. What could go wrong?”

Lyon went back to his food, smiling sadly. His mood seemed to have fallen, for no reason Knoll could intuit. “It isn't because I spilled coffee on it last week, right?”

It probably was. The thing hadn't acted up until after that, and any time Knoll chanced opening up his arm to get a look inside he was met with the strong smell of coffee.

“No, probably not,” Knoll replied. “It seems to give me trouble every couple of months anyway.”

Knoll spilled things on it too, in the past.

“I'll stop by your room later tonight with a screwdriver and some other tools and see what I can do,” Lyon said after a pause. “Will that be alright?”

“If you'd like.” Knoll withdrew his arm. It twitched oddly at the wrist. He only sighed. As long as it was compliant for the more delicate tasks that required a degree of finesse, he was happy. Or so he told himself.

They continued eating in comfortable silence for a bit. As Knoll saw it, they'd only become friends because of the close proximity with which they worked. Knoll was interested in the same things as Lyon, though his reasons for researching genetic modification had never been completely altruistic, unlike Lyon. In comparison, perhaps he felt a bit like a mad scientist.

“Did you think any more about which date you wanted to proceed with that... Test?”

“Oh! Yes, I did.” Lyon perked up at the talk of his research, purple eyes shining. “Sometime in the next two weeks I'll...” He paused, allowing himself an amused noise and continued in a joking tone. “Administer the dosage.”

Knoll smiled too, mirthlessly. The procedure was insane. Lyon was a visionary, but he was too brilliant to do anything the proper way, he supposed.

Lyon seemed to sense his sentiment. “It was fine on rats. Mice. Pigs... What haven't we tested? It'll be okay. This is how it has to be.”

“I know. I know.”

Knoll would never offer himself, but he would to save Lyon.

“Hey... Change the subject. Have we heard how Monica's doing?”

Three floors below, Monica had been held in the sick bay for months now. Her condition wasn't stable enough to transfer her to a better-equipped facility surface-side, but given the work done on the satellite, it wasn't a terrible place to be stuck.

That said...

“She... passed. I checked with the nurses this morning, since I figured you'd ask...”

“Oh...”

Knoll sighed. Lyon stared at his plate listlessly.

“Isn't it awful?”

“Yes,” Knoll agreed, though he wasn't sure at the exact specifics Lyon was asking.

“Humankind is so advanced now that I am sitting in front of a man with a mechanical arm on a spaceship orbiting the second planet humans have colonized at a rate of 22.36 times per solar cycle. We've seen the stars and found them too boring to stay, we've eliminated all the natural-born diseases native to Magvel, at least, and are quick at work on those evolving on Latona-6 right now... And we can't save a woman's life when she comes down with... What are they calling it?”

“Colloquially the surfacers are calling it putrification. It wasn't on Magvel, so...”

Lyon huffed, clearly frustrated. “She shouldn't have died, is what I'm saying. We can do better.”

“We will.”

That spark in Lyon's eye was why Knoll loved him, after all.

“What are they doing with her body?”

“Well, her husband will want it back, they said. He was on an armada tour, couldn't be with her in the end. One of the staff told me they were hoping to get tissue samples to study the proliferation of the bacteria.”

Lyon nodded. “A cure within five years. If it doesn't happen, I'll see to it myself.”

Knoll believed him. “Well, that's why we're here, isn't it?”

Lyon pushed his tray away and stood. “I'll meet you up in the lab in a bit. I want to send a holotape to the twins... With the way the extralink acts up on their ship, I have no way of knowing how long it will take to reach them.”

“Alright, Sir. I'll see you there.”

Lyon rolled his eyes. “Oh, stop that. Just Lyon. No 'doctor's, no 'sir's... Definitely not 'mister', Knoll, you're older than me!”

Knoll just smiled.

“Go call your twins.”

 


End file.
